Headline writers had a field day. "Congress ejects Pilot from power." "Pilot crash-lands." "Pilot ab co-pilot nahin," ran some of them. But the fact is that the fallout between Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and his deputy Sachin Pilot in Rajasthan, has left the Congress in a red-faced situation that the party is becoming increasingly familiar with. Even as it was picking up the pieces after Jyotiraditya Scindia's exit in Madhya Pradesh, Pilot, too, decided to march out of the door with a few loyalists. The script played out along similar lines. The so-called young guard felt short-changed at the hands of the old. The central leadership couldn't keep the house in order. And the party — for better or for worse — lost members who might have stayed back had the situation been amicably managed.

But the same scenario can unfold in a professional environment as well. Let's say that the Congress is a corporate entity instead of a political party. Its central leadership is then like the upper management. Pilot is a dynamic young employee who feels disgruntled about perceived injustice from a senior who's been with the company for years. And the MLAs who joined his breakaway camp are those team members who felt that unfairness was indeed being meted out to him. It can happen, so how does one go about resolving such an impasse in the work space? We speak to Nikhila Deshpande, life coach and founder of ITalk counseling centre, and to Dr Saurav Das, founder-CEO of Zetta Women, a city-based diversity and inclusion consulting venture. They break the issue down into separate factors.